Melissa R. Michelson

In Spring 2024, we conducted a randomized controlled trial in Latino-majority communities in Arizona and Texas to test the impact and effects of voter registration campaigns run by local Registrars in high schools. We theorized that bringing election officials into schools dispels informational uncertainty, cultivates positive political attitudes and emotions, and ultimately boosts voter registration rates. Two partner schools were identified in each state and then randomized into treatment and control conditions. Before treatment, seniors at all four high schools were asked to complete a survey about their interest in and attitudes toward politics and voting. Registrars then conducted in-person visits at the two treatment schools. After treatment, the seniors again were asked to complete a survey. We find that the Registrars’ visits increased enthusiasm, encouragement, and interest around voting and decreased anxiety.

Drag has a long history in the LGBTQ community as a means of political engagement, activism, protest, and community building. Today, drag is popular in the LGBTQ community and in the rest of society. At the same time, it is routinely a target of conservative backlash against the LGBTQ community. Despite drag’s inherently political nature, political science has failed to engage substantially with the influence of drag. This article offers a justification and research agenda to bring drag into the mainstream of political science.

College student voter turnout reflects the degree to which students are being taught to support and protect democracy, long a core mission of the U.S. higher education system. Yet, college student voter turnout is generally very low. In 2020–2021, campuses around the country participated in a coordinated program to increase college student voter registration during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using survey and focus group data collected in spring 2021, we find evidence of understudied barriers to student registration that continue to restrict the effectiveness of those efforts. Specifically, we find that students need help determining whether or how to choose a political party affiliation and whether to register with their campus address. Efforts to help students surmount these understudied challenges are a potentially powerful means of increasing youth registration and turnout. We also find that students operated as knowledge brokers, sharing with family members the information they were receiving on campus about how to register and vote using new virtual options offered due to the pandemic.

Students’ time in college often overlaps with their first experiences participating in the American electoral process. In this chapter, we offer guidance for faculty seeking to support students as they simultaneously explore new forms of scholarly inquiry and decide how to engage with U.S. elections. Drawing on over 10 years of collective experience teaching students about electoral participation and voter mobilization efforts, we review various ways we attempted to leave the boundaries of the classroom behind us, and engage students and communities in a key component of the democratic process. We review several successes and failures in terms of how we structured our projects, how we incentivized student involvement, and how we engaged with the broader community to generate our list of best practices for faculty hoping to implement similar projects. Together, our findings highlight the benefits and challenges of employing both experiments and community-engaged teaching with college students.

Drag has long been part of the LGBTQ rights movement. Drag performers play an important role as community leaders and political activists. Today, drag performers are also popular celebrities in the rest of society. This article explores the role of drag performers as community leaders and celebrities in the context of the 2020 presidential election. To understand this, we interviewed drag performers about their experiences using drag to mobilize voters. Research shows that Get Out The Vote (GOTV) efforts are more successful if they are led by volunteers and include trusted messengers while still being unexpected in some way. Drag performers are community leaders and volunteers and, when speaking about politics, deliver unexpected—and thus memorable—messages. The drag performers that we interviewed demonstrate the potential for drag artists to be effective GOTV messengers, in both the LGBTQ community and society more broadly.

Allport’s Theory of Interpersonal Contact suggests that coming into contact with a member of an outgroup should increase support for that outgroup. Previous studies find mixed results when applying Allport’s theory to reported contact with transgender people. We posit that this is due to imprecise and aggregated measures of contact and a lack of attention to the differences between contact that is ephemeral or ongoing and voluntary or obligatory. We explore our theories with data from a large, high-quality survey conducted in early 2020. We find that while various forms of contact (including voluntary and obligatory) predict warmer ratings on feeling thermometers, only close personal friendships—contact that is voluntary and ongoing—predicts attitudes toward transgender-inclusive policies.